I have observed that the children who experience the most success in school are those who are "in love" with their books and other literature. Good students actually embrace their material, while pouring over it with rapt attention. They lean forward, touching and pointing to the words on the page with their fingers, pens, or pencils. At the same time, they are sub-vocalizing the words that they are reading. They consume with a passion, while they are literally "eating up" the printed matter.
In contrast, the "failing student" uses body language that says to his books, "I want nothing to do with you! Don't come near me and don't touch me!" He sits at arms distance from his books and refuses to touch them, even while trying to read. He is detached, unfocused, diffuse, and in a state of fight and flight.
Is the failing student learning disabled? Is he suffering from attention deficit deficiency? Is this underachiever work inhibited? Is he all of the above?
When dealing with a disabled reader, one cannot be absolutely sure of the etiology of the difficulty, since one is never really sure of the underlying causes of the deficiencies.
As early as 1925 attempts were made to identify the syndrome of developmental reading disability in disabled readers. This syndrome was separated from mental effect and brain damage. Much evidence was found in young students to show that poor visual memory for recognizing the printed word resulted in poor reproduction for recalling the word for writing and thus impaired reading and spelling. Poor auditory memory for words would result in the interference with their reproduction in speech and writing. Taken together, they resulted in poor speech patterns, meager and confused vocabulary, ungrammatical writing, and poor spelling. To further weaken the circuit, poor handwriting and poor spelling would then result in poor visual or auditory reinforcement of word patterns.
As a frame of reference, a neurological concept was developed, which described three levels of cortical elaboration by which the sense organs received sensations. It was noted that anatomically different brain areas gave rise to: level 1.) awareness of an external stimulus; level 2.) recognition of its concrete meaning; and level 3.) association of language meaning to the stimulus. It was at this third level--the word level--in the visual or auditory areas of the brain, that specific delays occurred. This language disturbance was found in cases of developmentally word-blind or word-deaf children. In word-blind children, tests showed that in the visual area the youngsters with specific reading difficulties could see the print clearly, recognize that they were seeing letters and words, yet could not read them, i.e. identify them as meaningful language symbols. Similarly, in word-deaf youngsters there was adequate hearing, they could identify sound correctly, but had difficulty in associating concepts with spoken words.
But the prognosis was good. It was found that, in a direct attack upon the child's educational problem, all sorts of behavioral and emotional disturbances, which had been the result of academic failure, generally subsided or disappeared.